Radioactive Governance: The Politics of Expertise after Fukushima

This dissertation focuses on Japanese public and state responses to the release of radioactive contamination after the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster. I argue that the Fukushima nuclear disaster has led to the emergence of new forms of expertise in governing radioactive risks. These include techniques of governance that attempt to normalize peoples relationships with nuclear matter as an everyday concern. They also include decentralized strategies that empower victims of the disaster by providing access to technoscientifc practices of radiation monitoring and delegating radiation protection from the state to the citizens. My findings uncover a major shift in how societies have formerly organized responses to radioactive risks. In the aftermath of nuclear accidents, scholars have criticized central authoritarian decisions, in which state management of radioactive hazards was associated with politics of secrecy, victimhood, or public knowledge deficit. At stake in Fukushima is an increased normalization of citizens relationship with residual radioactivity, which is transformed into an everyday concern, rather than being represented as something exceptional. This is not only done by state experts, but equally via the increased activity of citizen scientists that collectively monitor residual radioactivity. My research is a significant departure from traditional sociocultural works that predominantly focus on micro-scale studies, such as how prior sociocultural factors influence a group understanding of radioactive risks. By highlighting major shifts in the structure of expertise and the regulation of life amidst toxic exposure, my research highlights how the management of contamination risks is evolving in an era where the impacts of modernization represent permanent marks on the planet

Le kawaii : répercussion d’un idéal culturel et médiatique sur l’identité féminine japonaise

Ce mémoire propose de mettre à jour l’impact d’une culture visuelle donnée dans la formation et la construction d’une identité féminine japonaise. L’idéal en question, connu sous le nom de kawaii, prône le caractère mignon, adorable et enfantin de la gent japonaise. Les représentations féminines y étant rattachées diffèrent en fonction des lieux et des clientèles visées. Ces différents façonnements ont par la suite une influence prépondérante sur la vision, la perception et l’acceptation sociale des Japonaises, notamment face à leur identité, mais aussi face aux rôles qu’elles entretiennent dans la société moderne. L’esthétisme du kawaii a vivement été critiqué dans les milieux anthropologiques. Nombreux sont ceux qui perçoivent cette image enfantine de manière négative, lui attribuant une influence particulièrement néfaste. Cependant, ces jugements découlent d’une incompréhension liée à des connotations spécifiques, ainsi qu’à des erreurs épistémologiques. L’hégémonie médiatique rattachée à l’idéal du kawaii provient surtout d’une politique économique favorisée par le gouvernement, répondant au nom de Cool Japan. Les représentations féminines y étant associées prônent le caractère docile, innocent et inférieur de la femme. Ces images ne sont pourtant pas représentatives des identités et des rôles véhiculés par la femme japonaise. Elles ne servent qu’à renforcer des présuposés culturels. De par le kawaii, les intellectuels, qu’ils soient Japonais ou non, ont bien souvent fait endosser aux Japonaises des identités et des rôles stéréotypés, qui sont pourtant loin d’être le lot de la jeune génération.The overall objective of this thesis is to update the impact of a given visual culture in the formation and construction of a female identity in Japan. This ideal, known as kawaii, advocates cuteness and childish behaviour. The female representations related to this ideal differ according to the different groups and locations analyzed. As a result, these variances have an important influence on the vision, perception and social acceptance of Japanese women, particularly when they are linked to their identity. The aesthetics of kawaii has been strongly criticized by the anthropological community. Cuteness has often been looked in a negative way as having harmful consequences for Japanese women. However, these judgments stem from a misunderstanding related to epistemological errors, as well as the misuse of the connotations of Japanese words. The hegemony attached to the ideal of kawaii mainly comes from an economic policy promoted by the government and known as Cool Japan. The female representations found in this policy are linked to the inferior state of Japanese women. Despite that, these images are not representative of identities and roles associated with Japanese women. They mainly reinforce cultural stereotypes. Through the kawaii phenomenon, intellectuals, be they Japanese or not, have often endorsed fixed identity and stereotyped gender roles for Japanese women, which are far from the reality of the younger generation

Radioactive Governance: The Politics of Expertise after Fukushima

This dissertation focuses on Japanese public and state responses to the release of radioactive contamination after the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster. I argue that the Fukushima nuclear disaster has led to the emergence of new forms of expertise in governing radioactive risks. These include techniques of governance that attempt to normalize peoples relationships with nuclear matter as an everyday concern. They also include decentralized strategies that empower victims of the disaster by providing access to technoscientifc practices of radiation monitoring and delegating radiation protection from the state to the citizens. My findings uncover a major shift in how societies have formerly organized responses to radioactive risks. In the aftermath of nuclear accidents, scholars have criticized central authoritarian decisions, in which state management of radioactive hazards was associated with politics of secrecy, victimhood, or public knowledge deficit. At stake in Fukushima is an increased normalization of citizens relationship with residual radioactivity, which is transformed into an everyday concern, rather than being represented as something exceptional. This is not only done by state experts, but equally via the increased activity of citizen scientists that collectively monitor residual radioactivity. My research is a significant departure from traditional sociocultural works that predominantly focus on micro-scale studies, such as how prior sociocultural factors influence a group understanding of radioactive risks. By highlighting major shifts in the structure of expertise and the regulation of life amidst toxic exposure, my research highlights how the management of contamination risks is evolving in an era where the impacts of modernization represent permanent marks on the planet

BioCaster in 2021: automatic disease outbreaks detection from global news media.

SUMMARY: BioCaster was launched in 2008 to provide an ontology-based text mining system for early disease detection from open news sources. Following a 6-year break, we have re-launched the system in 2021. Our goal is to systematically upgrade the methodology using state-of-the-art neural network language models, whilst retaining the original benefits that the system provided in terms of logical reasoning and automated early detection of infectious disease outbreaks. Here, we present recent extensions such as neural machine translation in 10 languages, neural classification of disease outbreak reports and a new cloud-based visualization dashboard. Furthermore, we discuss our vision for further improvements, including combining risk assessment with event semantics and assessing the risk of outbreaks with multi-granularity. We hope that these efforts will benefit the global public health community. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: BioCaster web-portal is freely accessible at http://biocaster.org.ESRC grant ES/T012277/